Focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology.

Examines hospital design in the United States from the 1870s through the 1940s. Jeanne Kisacky reveals the changing role of the hospital within the city, the competing claims of doctors and architects for expertise in hospital design, and the influence of new medical theories and practices on established traditions.

Using the story of cinchona bark, and drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Crawford shows how indigenous healers, labourers, merchants, colonial officials, and creole elites contested European science and thwarted imperial reform by asserting their authority to speak for the natural world.

Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge. Its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role. In this book, Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two British colonies: Madras in India and Quebec City in Canada.

The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or i'1/2imponderablei'1/2.

Explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens's involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction.